[Koha-devel] MARC::Record, record length and leader

[Julian Maurice]

Le 10/04/2012 17:15, Ian Walls a écrit :
> I'd advocate ISO-2709 only being an import/export format, and never
> using it internally.  It's just got too many limitations, as we're
> seeing here.
>
> On import, we check for valid leaders, and warn if not.
>
> On export, we calculate the leader, and if it exceeds 99999, we warn.
> We can develop several options for dealing with this, like truncating to
> the appropriate length, skipping the record or just exporting with an
> invalid leader.
>
> Cheers,
>
>
> -Ian
>

It's not really about ISO-2709 format (afaik, MARCXML has the same 
problem, leader must be 24 characters long), it's about MARC. And we are 
using it internally through MARC::Record.
As we already have invalid MARC records (ie. longer than 99999 bytes), 
and we want to keep the records as is, I think we should at least have a 
well-formed (but invalid) leader with first five characters being 
'99999', since sixth character will never be read to get the record 
length anyway.
What do you think?

-- 
Julian Maurice <julian.maurice at biblibre.com>
BibLibre